Tenth Year Standards Update

The AB/DL Survey Project started in 2006, now ten years ago. To date, several papers have been published to the website, and one paper is being developed for submission to a medical journal. Scientists outside the project have also been able to draw from this effort to aid in their own research, further broadening the understanding of infantilism.

The transition towards a more academic audience has brought with it a different set of conventions and standards. As a result, it seems fitting to make the following updates.

Modifying papers to better comply with the APA style guide, for example, to have an unlabeled Introduction section, mutually exclusive correct usage of that and which, etc. Additional formatting changes to better comply with the 290-page style guide may be made without additional notification. The papers will deviate from the style guide where beneficial, such as linking to survey questions.

Deleting data from potential minors; including those who did not complete the question on birth year, or who might have been minors based on birth year and response submission year. This also required a re-filtering of duplicate submissions, after purging data from potential minors: The previous filtering removed duplicates, leaving one submission and favoring the more complete submission. Simply purging data from potential minors might eliminate that remaining submission. As a result, it was necessary to re-include duplicates, delete data from potential minors, and then re-filter for duplicates. A third preliminary paper, which focused on the difference among AB/DLs by birth year, was significantly affected, and has been taken down.

Using a paper-based criteria for exclusion of partially complete responses. Previously, partial responses were included in results if the question(s) relevant to a particular plot or calculation were complete. This made preliminary calculations straightforward, but resulted in slight changes of sample size within a paper. Excluding responses that are missing answers to any of the questions relevant to the paper will permit a constant sample size within papers.

Switching mainly from the binomial test to the more conventional chi-square tests for significance testing. In addition to being the more often used test in practice, the chi-square tests are able to handle tables, unlike the binomial test. For statistically significant contrasts, the chi-square and the two-tailed binomial test generally gives similar results. The prior papers typically used single-tailed binomial tests, so the alphas will typically double, e.g. from .01 to .02. The Benjamini-Hochberg procedure will be used for post hoc tests. The overall effect will be more conservative tests for significance. (Edit: Due to the more conservative tests, and the reduced sample size from the changes above, a number of observations ceased to be significant. They have generally been cut from the papers and a note was added to the papers to record the change.)

Replacing 3D bar charts with 2D charts for improved clarity. The 4D disc plots (e.g. from "Mapping Paraphilic Infantilism and Diaper Fetishes") will be retained until a means of clearly representing the 4D data in a 2D format becomes available. Bars to indicate the standard error will be added where appropriate.

Manual cleanup of submissions.

Birth years entered as MM/DD/YYYY or 'YY were changed to YYYY. Similarly, if the year was entered in to questions that asked for ages (e.g. Survey #1, Question #15 or S1Q15, & S4Q21), the age would be calculated if the year was entered as YYYY. If entered as YY, the age was interpreted as a year and corrected only if the combination of age and birth year would result in a year that was after the submission date (e.g. 70, 1960). The original value was preserved in a comment on the submission. Previously, this was addressed in the analysis software, which didn't handle all responses correctly.

Omitted answers were completed if the answer is known from previous multiple-choice questions (e.g. some who reported less than two younger siblings total in S2Q11 and S2Q12 skipped S2Q14, which asked if their next younger siblings were twins.) A comment marking the cleanup was also added to the submission.

To avoid ambiguity, an additional answer was added to questions that were skipped per survey instructions but that did not already have a "not applicable" option (e.g. so the summary results for S4Q27, on whether the discussing AB/DL interests with a counselor, therapist, or mental health professional was helpful, will display an additional value, representing those who in S4Q26 reported that they hadn't had such a discussion.) For questions that should have been skipped per survey instructions, answers were set to the "not applicable" option to avoid ambiguity (e.g. in S4Q27, to avoid mixing answers based on the expectations with answers based on experiences).

In cases where responses left blank were being misinterpreted by the analysis software, the blank entry was replaced with the text "blank" if the question asked for a text value or in the case of S4Q21, "0" and a note that it was blank. (A "0" value was not added to blank responses to S1Q15, were zero was a valid response. In analysis, one was added to the S1Q15 responses to preserve responses of "0", as a value of zero was used to mark a lack of an answer. This one was then subtracted from the results.)

Errors in spelling, etc., were corrected in text quoted from responses in the quoted version. The original submission was not changed.

Standardizing around percent (number), e.g. 22% (237), as a format for presenting results in text.

The impact of these updates to specific papers will be detailed in notes added to the papers.